What Uganda must do to manage high salary hopes

The current demands for salary increment point to one thing - that the economy is not doing well. Uganda’s economy is yet to pick after the challenges it sailed through last year, including the slow recovery after elections, the very high cost of power, the high cost of credit orchestrating bailout requests after October 2016 and market shut down, especially in South Sudan.
Teachers, State prosecutors, judicial officers, health workers, now again lecturers, are all craving for higher pay. The entire civil service is yearning for bigger pay cheques.

Admittedly, some of these workers are doing extraordinary jobs to either save lives, build human capital or adjudicate cases. These are valid reasons to ask for not only a better pay, but also a pay that is commensurate with the work they do.
The unprecedented disparities created across the civil service, however, especially with specific focus on key parastatals, are enormous and must be reviewed.

Ugandans look to Parliament to receive and debate these issues with all the objectivity they deserve, with the hope that even beyond the work that the Equal Opportunities Commission is already doing, we find a lasting solution to this challenge. Only the private sector is quiet about the low pay (profits)!
If all of us are going to be satisfied, the private sector must quickly expand and generate revenues for government in order to make all these groups happy. I do not see any short cuts. We cannot borrow money to meet these obligations as it is bad economics and unsustainable.

It is, therefore, important that all these demanding groups support and help us deliver a better business environment - one that can help us reduce the cost of doing business so that we can grow investments and expand the revenue base.
The philosophy of the business community - is that in order to bake a bigger cake from which all of us can benefit, we must first create opportunities for investment to expand so that we can have more tax revenues and a bigger pool of resources we can draw from.
Short of this, the government cannot and has no basis to promise salary increases. While this may seem obvious to some people, to others, it may far-fetched and we must work on mindsets across the entire government, including Parliament.

The Executive, Judiciary and Parliament are all asking for higher pay in an environment where we are only doing 13 per cent tax in GDP. This does not add up and we run a risk of de-allocating resources from efforts that are geared towards creating wealth, to simply pleasing our workers in a manner that shall not be sustainable.
The Kenyan leadership has put their foot down and we must learn from them. Remember that government is running a non-contributory pension scheme for all these demanding workers. The private sector is contributing for all these government workers so they can lead a good life after retirement.

Domestic arrears have accumulated partly because of this reason - that government is spending huge sums of money dealing with these high expectations rather than pay the private sector for the goods and services supplied so as to ease their cash flows. We must all be sober enough and rethink this move.
I propose that we first support a better business environment to be delivered so that we can get the private sector participate more in mobilising more resources to pay our workers better.

Mr Badagawa is the executive director Private Sector Foundation Uganda